The Delusions of Certainty by Siri Hustvedt

Author:Siri Hustvedt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

GOFAI vs. Know-How

As is true of every discipline, the story of artificial intelligence has not been free of conflict. In the days of the Macy conferences, for example, many and diverse disciplines and points of view were represented. John Dewey was on the Macy board. Warren McCulloch and the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead belonged to the core conference group, as did the strong-willed and articulate psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie. I find it amusing that on one occasion Kubie did his best to discuss the unconscious with an uncomprehending Walter Pitts, who compared it to “a vermiform appendix” that “performs no function” but “becomes diseased with extreme ease.”232 Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, the philosopher Susanne Langer, Claude Shannon, and the psychologist Erik Erikson all participated in or were guests at the conferences. Extraordinary thinkers were brought together in one place. Cybernetics was interdisciplinary by definition. It addressed systems and control in a wholly abstract, dematerialized way that could be applied to anything. Furthermore, it was not reductionist. It emphasized the relations between and among the various parts of any dynamic system. The movement of information and feedback, both positive and negative, were key to the system’s self-organization, an organization that was in no way dependent on the matter in which it was instantiated. Without this precedent, Pinker could not claim that concepts such as “information,” “computation,” and “feedback” describe “the deepest understanding of what life is, how it works and what forms it is likely to take elsewhere in the universe.” Cybernetics and linked theories, such as systems theory, have had strikingly diverse applications. They have come to roost in everything from cellular structures to corporations to tourism and family therapy.

And yet, the interdisciplinary character of cybernetics made definitions of the concepts involved all that more important. There was much intense discussion at the Macy conferences about digital (or discrete) processes versus analog (or continuous) ones, and there was no general agreement on how to understand the distinction. Gregory Bateson observed, “It would be a good thing to tidy up our vocabulary.” Tidying up vocabulary may indeed be one of the most difficult aspects of doing any science. J. C. R. Licklider, a psychologist who did research that would lead to the creation of the Internet, wanted to know how the analog/digital distinction related to an actual nervous system. Von Neumann admitted, “Present use of the terms analogical and digital in science is not completely uniform.” He also said that in “almost all parts of physics the underlying reality is analogical. The digital procedure is usually a human artifact for the sake of description.”233 Just as the physician explained to his medical students that the “mechanical steps” he outlined to describe labor and birth were a way to divide up “a natural continuum,” von Neumann viewed the digital as the scientist’s descriptive tool and the analogical as its referent. In his later theory of automata paper, von Neumann would characterize living organisms as both digital and analog. The ideal neurons of McCulloch and Pitts functioned digitally.

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